Many retail outlets serve drinks of all sorts in disposable cups. Fast food restaurants, convenience stores, and the like all provide millions of drinks in disposable cups on a daily basis. Hot drinks such as coffee, hot chocolate, tea and the like are placed in disposable, insulated cups. Cold drinks are commonly placed in plastic or another disposable container. Disposable lids and sized to fit the disposable cups. The disposable lids can be placed on the cup by a restaurant employee. This is commonplace, for example, in a drive-through or drive-up restaurant. The lid prevents spills when a drink is passed to the consumer in an automobile, truck or other mode of transportation. The lid also prevents spills when the vehicle is underway. In some fast food restaurants, the consumer is given the choice of dining in or taking the meal from the restaurant. Even though some are dining in they are provided with the option of getting and placing a lid on a disposable cup. They may have small children or may be cautious.
In any event, the restaurant employee or consumer usually obtains the lid and places it on a disposable cup. In some beverage dispensing situations, beverage cup lids are dispensed to customers in a vertical stack or in elongated horizontal trays. When cup lids are tendered in a vertical stack, customers must grab a lid from the top of the stack. Customers of varying heights are not all able to conveniently reach the top of the stack. Because the lids are nested and held together via frictional fit, they will often stick together so that a customer will pick up more than one lid. The excess lids are normally put back on the stack, dropped on the counter, or thrown into the trash. When cup lids are presented in a tray or hopper, two hands are often needed by a customer to separate the nested lids. Additionally, such lids frequently become disordered and are often handled by more than one customer, thus resulting in increased risk of unsanitary conditions. People's hands include germs. Therefore, by touching the stack of lids, the germs on each person's hands are transferred to the stack. Even people that wash their hands regularly will have germs on their hands. Germs that could possibly spread infection are placed on the stack of lids via touch. The more times the stack is touched or handled, the greater the likelihood of spreading an infection.
When a dispenser is placed behind the counter where only employees are able to dispense lids, the dispenser is much less likely to be contaminated. The employees are required to wash their hands. Customers are not required to wash their hands. As a result, when the dispenser is placed in a public portion of a restaurant for customers to use on a self-service fashion, the likelihood of contamination increases dramatically since the lids are subjected to more people, some of which may not wash their hands.